The Wonderful Year 1603

Printed in 1603, this pamphlet is Thomas Dekker's prose account of a single English year. He first mourns Elizabeth I, then marks the overnight change of loyalty as James I is proclaimed, and then turns to the plague that shut the London theatres and filled the bills of mortality. Personified Death and Pestilence move through streets, suburbs, and the countryside; Dekker mixes lament, moral satire, and comic or grim anecdotes of flight, burial, and fraud. A closing set of short tales is offered as winter entertainment. The work is a plague pamphlet and civic report, not a play and not a later history of the Stuarts.

Quarter bound in brown cloth, purple moiré silk boards, cover-label printed in brown. Ann Muir marbled endleaves. Gilt top page edge. Transparent plastic dust-cover. No slipcase.